Tag: time

The Net isn’t terribly good as movies go, but it is more real, more current, than I suspected two decades ago. Our feelings about these changes were mirrored in the movies as fear and beguilement-a bunch of rubes trying to make sense of this darned technology eager to eat our minds. The internet is still eating our minds-and now, more than ever, the movies themselves. Dozens of recent movies dramatize the act of vanishing down the internet’s rabbit holes, into the gloss of a digitally manipulated life. The sequel to 2015’s slick, unnerving horror movie Unfriended will travel to the Dark Web, where the most ghoulish, Bitcoin-backed corners of the internet spring to life, and, eventually, bring death. All of these movies are products of a world that isn’t necessarily afraid of the internet-just obsessed with it. Movies about the consequences of the internet aren’t new, exactly. It has zapped movies of an inherent power-the ability to transport, to reinvent or recontextualize what’s possible in the world.

Newport shared how he manages to get a seemingly impossible amount of work done – including writing books, publishing academic papers, and teaching courses – all while leaving work by 5:30 p.m. and making time for his family and personal life. 5 Ways to Be More Productive at Work What is deep work? Deep work boils down to the relatively simple idea that working distraction-free allows you to both improve your professional capabilities and produce higher-quality, more valuable work. Deep work tackles this by saying you can reevaluate your habits to use your time more productively, create more meaningful work, and get better at what you do so you can accomplish more than you ever thought possible. You probably spend less time than you realize getting down to work without interruption. We can facilitate inspiration by setting aside time to work hard. Stopping what you’re doing to answer every message that comes through makes it a lot more difficult and time-consuming to jump back into the task you were previously working on, even if you don’t realize it. It’s not easy to make the changes that Newport lays out in Deep Work.

It may be time to tailor students’ class schedules to their natural biological rhythms, according to a new study from UC Berkeley and Northeastern Illinois University. After sorting the students into “Night owls,” “Daytime finches” and “Morning larks” – based on their activities on days they were not in class – researchers compared their class times to their academic outcomes. Their findings, published today in the journal Scientific Reports, show that students whose circadian rhythms were out of sync with their class schedules – say, night owls taking early morning courses – received lower grades due to “Social jet lag,” a condition in which peak alertness times are at odds with work, school or other demands. “We found that the majority of students were being jet-lagged by their class times, which correlated very strongly with decreased academic performance,” said study co-lead author Benjamin Smarr, a postdoctoral fellow who studies circadian rhythm disruptions in the lab of UC Berkeley psychology professor Lance Kriegsfeld. While students of all categories suffered from class-induced jet lag, the study found that night owls were especially vulnerable, many appearing so chronically jet-lagged that they were unable to perform optimally at any time of day. To separate the owls from the larks from the finches, and gain a more accurate alertness profile, the researchers tracked students’ activity levels on days that they did not attend a class. Finding these patterns reflected in students’ login data spurred researchers to investigate whether digital records might also reflect the biological rhythms underlying people’s behavior. The results suggest that “Rather than admonish late students to go to bed earlier, in conflict with their biological rhythms, we should work to individualize education so that learning and classes are structured to take advantage of knowing what time of day a given student will be most capable of learning,” Smarr said.

It’s easy to see why: saying no to something unimportant gives you more time to spend on things that are. When you say no to something, what exactly are you saying yes to? While I originally put these photos here because they’re nice to look at, over time, they’ve turned into a reminder of what I’m saying no to when I say yes to something else. Every time I say yes to traveling somewhere, I say no to spending time with the people in those picture frames. These are what you say no to when you say yes to working late, watching Netflix, and using your smartphone in bed. These are what you say no to when you say yes to unnecessary projects, checking your email superfluously, or agreeing to an unnecessary meeting. You make more intentional decisions when you consider what you’re saying no to when you say yes to something else. Make sure the things you say yes to are both meaningful and valuable-because every yes is also a no.

Vern Bengtson, a sociologist who ran a major study of at-home religious practices that spanned nearly four decades, called family home evening one of “The most successful [religious] programs fostering intergenerational connections and the nurturing of families.” This, at least, is the ideal. Among some seasoned practitioners, family home evening has been called “The family fight that begins and ends with prayer.” The Mormon humorist Robert Kirby has referred to it as “Family home screaming.” In 1915, the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recommended that church members arrange monthly “Home evenings” to strengthen family ties-a goal that many present-day Mormons consider to have been prescient, given the dramatic changes to family life that have come in the intervening century. The leaders outlined a window of time “Devoted to prayer, singing hymns, songs, instrumental music, scripture reading, family topics, and specific instruction on the principles of the gospel and on the ethical problems of life, as well as the duties and obligations of children to parents, the home, the Church, society, and the nation.” As their vision suggests, family home evening wasn’t ever intended to be strictly religious. One of family home evening’s best qualities is its ability to get each generation of a family involved, as one of us, David, can attest. His late father lived with his family for 17 years and participated in more than 800 family evenings. The central features of the family home evening are transferrable to families of other faiths or no faith at all. Ultimately, what seems to matter most about family home evening is not the specific rituals, but that there are rituals at all-that a family decides to set aside a specific time of the week to gather and have a meaningful experience together.

The Palace, as envisioned by creator Jim Bumgardner, was a place where users could create avatars and chat semi-anonymously. Bumgardner had been dreaming up a chat server like The Palace since the mid ’80s, though at that time, it was more of a text-based bulletin board called “The Mansion.” He finally created The Palace while working at Time-Warner as a lead programmer in 1994, and after a year in development, The Palace’s main server opened in 1995. Clothing varied – users edited avatars using The Palace’s prop editor – but one thing was always the same: you rarely saw the eyes. The Palace avatars became known as “Dollz,” or digital paper dolls, in the next evolution of avatars. A user looking to save slots, perhaps, for accessories, could manipulate pixels atop the naked body to save space – a move that would become very important in The Palace’s avatar editing contests, which propelled the servers’ growing traffic. Most avatars stood naked on their boxes awaiting the judge’s theme, revealing what was often banned on The Palace’s servers – a naked body. Some tried to challenge cultural standards of beauty within The Palace’s dollz rooms: an improv performance group, Desktop Theater, tested norms by entering doll spaces with a crudely drawn avatar, challenging users to consider fat bodies or queer expression. Non-white avatars, like fat bodies on The Palace, were rare, though Greenwood acknowledged there was a demand for them.

If you’re like many leaders in the startup environment, you might be managing people for the first time-possibly without the training and development that leaders in mature companies receive on a regular basis. Develop your leadership style with these five essential management skills we’ve distilled while consulting with some of the most successful leaders in the world. Instead, managers need to create the opportunity for new thinking and behavior to take root. The manager understood this when he encouraged the team to host weekly potlucks. Everyone on the team knows that sharing ideas and information is critical to the company culture and its success-all because the manager made collaboration a priority, not an afterthought. A recent Gallup poll showed that managers who received regular feedback were 10% more profitable than those who did not. Managers are quick to give feedback when anyone on the team is missing the mark. To get up-to-speed quickly, focus on honing these fundamentals for an instant boost to your impact and effectiveness as a leader: clarify expectations, lead culture, give recognition, ask for feedback, and manage your time.

We try to squeeze as many hours in one work day, to be “Productive”, but in the end everything depends less on time, and more on your focus, motivation and overall well-being. The 2-minute rule: if you can do something in two minutes, do it now. The 5-minute rule: the biggest cure against procrastination is to set your goal not to finish a scary big hairy task, but to just work five minutes on it. Seinfeld’s productivity chain: if you want to be good at something, do it every day. You need discipline, and this means for me two things: I plan my day first thing in the morning, and I write a short daily log every day. Don’t read your email first thing in the day, don’t read it in the evening, and try to do it only 3 times a day: at 11am, 2pm and 5pm. And your email inbox is not a todo list. Start with the most important first thing in the morning. The new one took two and a half days and we did it over one hackathon weekend.

“Susan’s going to kill me,” Billy Beane joked when I called him for a comment at the end of the Winter Meetings last year. Susan Slusser is the formidable, competition-crushing A’s beat writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Flash forward a few million words later, and Susan is still the person I most want to see after deadline. In my household, Susan has the territorial rights to the A’s while I focus more on the 49ers and Giants. A’s players revere Susan for her fairness, accuracy, accountability, comic timing and ferocious work ethic. I once approached Jose Guillen at his locker and told him I was married to Susan Slusser. Then I told him I’m married to Susan Slusser. Unless Susan had snuck into the cargo hold – the kind of thing she would totally do – I was going to have the A’s executive vice president all to myself once the plane landed.

The to-do list can be an indispensable tool when used to mindfully manage your time. Most of us fail to do this, and so our lists are crammed with urgent priorities we must get done immediately, important tasks we’re afraid of forgetting because they have no specific due date, and basic tasks that we add to the list because it makes us feel good to check something off. The third list is a not-to-do list, to remind me of things I’ve consciously decided aren’t worth my time. Taking the time to develop a clear mission – your personal purpose – and a vision of what success looks like is essential if you are to be judicious about determining what is important enough to get on your list in the first place. Once your list is pruned and prioritized, estimate how long you expect each task will take to complete. Most people find it energizing to cross items off their list and why wouldn’t they? Accomplishing tasks causes your brain to release dopamine, which is also known as the “Feel-good neurotransmitter.” If getting started is a challenge for you, look for a task that will be quick to complete and, as the Nike ads famously say, just do it. For more complex projects, create a list of the critical success factors you will need to complete them and tackle them one at a time. Does gaining more control over how you spend your time feel both urgent and important? If so, put an appointment on your calendar to review and prioritize your to-do list according to these criteria.